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Everyone knows the story about Richard Gere. Few know how it started. For four decades, a salacious and unproven rumor has shadowed one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Investigative reporter Allen Salkin spent six years chasing its origins — and uncovered a story about gossip, power, politics, the internet and the peculiar wiring of our own brains.
New episodes every Thursday.
Episode
- 8 - The Alibi · 53 mnt · Episode 8Gere has a story he tells friends about where this all started but does it hold up? We chase an espionage angle, consider Chinese disinformation as retaliation for his Tibet…
- 7 - A Guide to Dating Gerbils · 1 jam 6 mnt · Episode 7The Toronto Film Festival, a Hollywood sitcom writers room, and a Manhattan humor magazine provide clues through the murkiest origins of the rumor. Testimony from writers and…
- 6 - Fear and Biting in Mesa · 50 mnt · Episode 6Gerbils have been illegal in California since 1924. So how does the rumor even work? Allen road-trips to Arizona to meet real gerbils, becomes a casualty of a nasty hamster…
- 5 - Without a Base, Without a Trace · 46 mnt · Episode 5Is "gerbiling” actually a real thing? Between a bestiality investigator's case file, a 2024 FBI report, and doctors who've seen things, we go looking for the line between urban…
- 4 - Tail Between His Legs · 47 mnt · Episode 4In the 1980’s after Rock Hudson's death, Hollywood's homophobia is in full panic mode, and American culture is whispering about – and mocking – the sexuality of leading men…
- 3 - Sex Object · 46 mnt · Episode 3Playing pimps and hustlers, attacking the press, projecting an unreadable sexuality — welcome to early Richard Gere. Bret Easton Ellis, Karina Longworth, and journalist Michael…
- 1 - The Word · 41 mnt · Episode 1Say "gerbil" to someone and watch their face. Everyone's heard the rumor. Nobody knows where it came from. Reporter Allen Salkin isn't sure he should be the one to dig into it…
- 2 - The Philadelphia Gerbil Panic of 1985 · 52 mnt · Episode 2Could Jerry Penacoli — Philly's golden-boy newsman, be the Gerbil rumor's actual patient zero? Eyewitnesses and archival tape tell a wilder, sadder story than anyone remembers…
- Gerbil: Inside Hollywood’s Most Unkillable Rumor - Trailer · 2 mntThe Richard Gere gerbil rumor won’t die. Why? Did a movie star really show up at a hospital in the 1980s with a rodent in his rectum he’d inserted for sexual pleasure?…
